For the final, revised version, please see the paper or electronic copy
of
International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education(if your institution's library subscribes to QSE, it will
also have an electronic subscription; see website below)

Audrey Thompson is an associate professor in Education, Culture and
Society and an adjunct professor in the Ethnic Studies Program at the University
of Utah. Her research interests include whiteness theory, feminist ethics
and epistemology, African-American epistemology, feminist and anti-racist
pedagogies, and writing/research epistemologies.

Tiffany, Friend of People of Color:

White Investments in Anti-Racism

Abstract

Whites have long designated people of color as "good" when
they were "friends of the white man." In a reverse move, some anti-racist
whites now identify themselves as "good" whites — as friends of people
of color. A number of anti-racist psychologists and teacher educators have
argued in support of this move. To develop a coherent and abidingly anti-racist
stance, they say, white students and teachers must feel positive about
their racial identity. If the "anti" aspect of anti-racist white identity
development is given too large a role, learners will have no room to measure
themselves in proactive as opposed to reactive terms. Accordingly, white
students need to be able to think of themselves as "allies" of people of
color. Although less likely than students to aspire to the status of friend
of people of color, progressive white professors, too, insofar as they
pride themselves on "getting" race issues, congratulate themselves on being
exceptional whites. Both forms of white exceptionalism rely on an indispensable
"anti" status: anti-racist whites are invited to see themselves as not
that
kind of white and to embrace only those aspects of whiteness that can be
construed as positive. This paper argues that progressive whites must interrogate
the very ways of being good that white identity theory offers to protect,
for the moral framing that gives whites credit for being anti-racist is
parasitic on the racism that it is meant to challenge. In order to move
towards new conceptions of white anti-racism, the paper argues,
we need to adopt emergent approaches to both cross-race and intrarace relations.

Tiffany, Friend of People of Color:

White Investments in Anti-Racism

Books with "friend of the white man" in the title are no longer embraced
with quite the same open enthusiasm as they once were. You can still find
Squanto:
Friend of the White Men in school libraries, but it is gradually being
replaced with Squanto: Friend of the Pilgrims.(1)
At one time it seemed obvious to whites that anyone who was a friend of
the white man was somebody who ought to go down in history, presumably
because whites have had so few friends; now, however, we understand that
it is arrogant to organize history around whites and people who have been
friendly to them. Although the category of cross-race friendship seems
to be embedded more firmly than ever in the white imagination, colorblind
protocols require that whiteness be played down as the explicit reference
point for friendship. Thus, Squanto becomes the "friend of the pilgrims"
and Pocahontas the "friend of the colonists."(2)
Sacagawea, Pocahontas, and Squanto — not to mention Tonto — still figure
as significant insofar as they are friends to the white man, but the coded
language makes the friendship sound more individual, more local, less a
matter of race.

Yet even as whites have begun to back away from explicit assessments
of people of color as "friends of white men," we have embraced the idea
that whites can be "friends of people of color." It is not a new idea;
Custer himself declared that the white man was "the Indian's best friend."(3)
But we mean it differently, not that way. We mean that we are supporters
of people of color, that we understand about white racism and that we are
against it.(4) We are not that sort of white;
we are good whites. Anti-racist whites know not to talk about "good Negroes,"
"friendly Indians," or "good Mexicans," but somehow it seems different
to talk about "good whites" — about "Tiffany, friend of people of color."(5)

It is because whites are uncomfortable with the implications of acknowledging
white racism that (whether or not we use the term) we are tempted to position
ourselves as "good whites."(6) Although
we can acknowledge white racism as a generic fact, it is hard to acknowledge
as a fact about ourselves. We want to feel like, and to be, good people.
And we want to be seen as good people. This need is often more apparent
among white college students who are first beginning to struggle with the
implications of racism than among advanced white graduate students and
white professors who have spent years studying racism and anti-racism.
For the white student who is new to colored epistemologies, whiteness theory,
critical race theory, and postcolonial critiques of white racism, it can
be devastating to realize that people of color — people who, not by coincidence,
do not really even know you — can make judgments about you and just assume
that you are racist without giving you the chance to prove otherwise.(7)
In some cases, white students will ask students of color, "How can I prove
to you that I am trustworthy?" Other white students want to start from
the presumption that they are nonracist, insisting that "If I can't be
part of your black feminist study group, you're being a racist."(8)
Still other white students may recount personal histories testifying to
their colorblindness, their near-color experiences, and their distinctive
status as friends of people of color.

The self-centeredness of these stories, questions, and objections can
be frustrating to students and faculty of color and their naïveté is
frustrating to progressive white teachers who want the white students to
hurry along, to get it faster than they seem to be doing. Sometimes
white professors just tell their Tiffanies outright, "We don't get to be
blameless. Get used to being uncomfortable about being white." Yet the
assumptions that progressive white teachers — call us Dr. Lincolns —
make about correct anti-racism smack of much the same idealism as
does the Tiffanies' insistence on being acknowledged as good whites. To
the extent that Dr. Lincolns become complacent that we, at least,
are doing it right — that we really do get it — we buy into the notion
that, secretly, we are "the friends of people of color."(9)
Regarding ourselves as authoritatively anti-racist, we keep whiteness at
the center of anti-racism.(10)

How to Read This Essay

In the struggle to keep whiteness off-center in this essay, I violate several
scholarly practices. Not only have I not framed the issues in terms of
a review of the literature, but I have specifically avoided offering implications
for practice. I have also troubled the scholarly preference for linearity
and foundationalism. Educational journals generally look for a seamless
text in which each paragraph either builds on a previous paragraph or follows
a predictable path (as in the APA introduction-method-results-discussion
format). Because I want to underscore the whiteness of our desire for safety,
blamelessness, and certainty, I have avoided laying a foundation and building
on it. Instead, I have organized the paper in terms of the constellation
of places to which we as white teachers and students continually retreat;
in effect, I have tried to follow the white reader and myself to those
places of retreat.

Both to trouble the seamless narrative structure and to avoid the rhetorical
effect of the author-date system's constant invocation of authority (Adam,
1999; Eve, 1998), I have used Chicago-style endnotes in preference to APA
style. Most educational journals follow the APA guidelines in discouraging
the use of discursive endnotes and footnotes, which are said to be "distracting
to readers." According to the APA Manual, "an author integrates
an article best by presenting important information in the text, not in
a footnote."(11) Implicitly, if the material
is not "important" enough to include in the text, it is non-essential.
Indeed, the APA Manual discourages discursive writing even in the
text, holding that "discursive writing often obscures an author's main
points."(12) My intent here, however, is
not to argue for a series of main points but to initiate an open-ended
conversation.(13) Accordingly, I have sought
a relational form of address, setting aside both the objective, impersonal
voice of academic authority and the confessional approach sometimes conflated
with a personal voice.(14) The distracting
endnotes help to foreclose tidy integration by providing "a second, parallel
text."(15) I also use the notes to separate
the scholarly apparatus of citation from the conversation.

My efforts to problematize the whiteness of scholarly apparatuses and
conventions are at best partial and problematic. The paper is still a scholarly
paper and does not, in itself, call into question academic ways of making
meaning. A more radical format might have eschewed references altogether,
might have turned to entirely different sources of epistemic authority,
or might have worked within nonscholarly and nonmainstream genres. Even
then, it would be hard to undo white privilege by writing about it. Writing
about whiteness redounds to whites' benefit; institutionally, if not also
politically and morally, we get "credit" for such work. Perhaps in a few
years we will know better how to talk about whiteness in academia without
reinscribing all the instrumentalities of academic whiteness, but for the
moment, we are still building the tools we need to build anti-racist tools.(16)

Student and Faculty Investments in "Good" White Identity

The desire to be and to be known as a good white person stems from the
recognition that our whiteness is problematic, a recognition that we try
to escape by being demonstrably different from other, racist whites. Among
students who are relatively new to whiteness theory or related theories
about racism, exceptionalism tends to take the form of statements about
how different they are from other whites.(17)
To defend her status as nonracist, a white woman might say, "My husband
is a terrible racist," meaning, "In comparison to other whites I know,
I'm really open-minded."(18) Not only do
such discursive moves shift the blame for racism to more obviously blameworthy
whites, but they shift the focus of the anti-racist project to whites who
really
have a problem.(19)

Other white students may invoke narratives that attempt to invalidate
charges of racism by proving that the speaker has always been connected
to people of color and has had any number of near-color experiences —
perhaps a former African-American boyfriend, a Korean-American school friend
in first grade, or a memorable teaching experience involving foreigners.
In such narratives, the white student may not seek entirely to escape responsibility;
she may recognize, for example, that her near-color experiences have not
stopped her from enjoying white privilege. Her concern is less to avoid
blame than to demonstrate friendship and solidarity with people of color
— to show that she gets racism in ways that other whites do not.
Lest the moral of such stories be overlooked, it is underscored: "I spent
a lot of time with the Tongans from my church, last summer, and I saw firsthand
the prejudice they faced."

Like white students, white professors make self-congratulatory assumptions
about our anti-racist credentials. But because our own investments in whiteness
are far less visible to us, we often write and talk as if racism and whiteness
were problems we could solve through pedagogy: they are our students' problems.
Strictly speaking, we may not believe that we are exempt — we
may know better — but we tend to act as if we believe it. Partly, this
may be because we associate Tiffany-like behavior with appeals to feelings,
anecdotal evidence, and "common" sense. Whereas white students who are
new to racialized analyses tend to base their claims on personal experience,
white professors and doctoral students appeal to research as the basis
for our racial awareness and insight. Indeed, we often take it for granted
that our studied anti-racism is the standard to which other whites should
be held; at the same time, however, we may anxiously try to prove our anti-racist
credentials by positioning ourselves in unproblematic solidarity with scholars
of color.

A case study of white professorial anxiety might be found in white feminists'
efforts to blur the boundaries between ourselves and feminists of color.
Although we have known for years that the term "feminist" is a false universal,
we continue to call ourselves feminists as if the term were all-embracing
and unproblematic. As Patricia Hill Collins reminds us, Black feminists
usually call themselves black feminists specifically to distance
themselves from the implicit whiteness of "feminism." "Inserting the adjective
Black"
in front of the word feminism "challenges the assumed whiteness of feminism
and disrupts the false universalism of this term."(20)
Many progressive white women acknowledge the misleading character of the
unqualified term "feminist," yet we tend to balk at calling ourselves "white
feminists," a term that seems to leave whiteness unproblematized and monolithic.
We know "feminist" is a false universal, but we still cannot quite bring
ourselves to say white feminist. It sounds as if we might be racist,
and we do not want to be thought of as racist.

A more attractive option would be to call ourselves "anti-racist white
feminists," but Collins troubles the complacency of that category as well.
"Even well-meaning White feminists," she says, "can inadvertently consume
the limited resources of African-American women who claim Black feminism."
Having to support and applaud "White women in their efforts to foster an
anti-racist feminism diverts Black women's energy from addressing social
issues facing African-American communities."(21)
In itself, anti-racism is not the problem; the problem lies with the agenda
it often conceals, namely, white academics' desire for unproblematic solidarity
with people of color — people with other kinds of anti-racist
commitments. Embracing "anti-racist" as a descriptor enables us to reintroduce
the disallowed universalism of "feminist" under the guise of a nonwhite-centered
solidarity: if we cannot all call ourselves just plain "feminists," at
least we can all call ourselves "anti-racist feminists."

Aside from smuggling universalism back into progressive causes, the
generic term "anti-racist" is problematic because it fails to clarify what
white academic anti-racism means, pragmatically — what shape and
consequences it has, what it amounts to other than using and talking about
the right texts and the right names.(22)
If white progressive educators' commitments to anti-racism begin and end
with reading and citing and teaching the texts of people of color, it is
hard to see how anti-racism is all that different from academic business
as usual. Are we satisfied, for example, with invoking Toni Morrison and
bell hooks and Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga and Paula Gunn Allen
and Patricia Hill Collins, while continuing to think of knowledge and social
change in more or less the same generically progressive ways?

Indeed, Collins finds it suspicious that black feminism is "so well
received by White women."(23) Such suspicions
are prompted by the history of whites' appropriation of black and brown
bodies, words, songs, and symbols.(24)
As Nell Irvin Painter observes, white women have long taken up black women's
texts and voices for our own activist purposes — profiting much more
from the commodification of black voices than have the black women invoked
in the white texts. Whereas Sojourner Truth had to sell photographic cartes
de visite for 33 cents apiece to support her abolitionist work, Harriet
Beecher Stowe earned money by writing about Truth and other African
Americans.(25) Tapping "a marketable subject"
in an era when "material on the Negro was very much in demand," Stowe —
who had already made a fortune from Uncle Tom's Cabin but found
herself in need of further funds — "min[ed] the vein that had produced
her black characters in Uncle Tom's Cabin." Writing for the prestigious
Atlantic
Monthly, Stowe "made Truth into a quaint and innocent exotic who disdained
feminism."(26) Later, in a reversal of
her symbolic fortunes, Truth was appropriated for white feminist purposes.
In the white feminist reform literature, Sojourner Truth became a suffragist
more than an abolitionist symbol, famous mostly for having said "and ar'n't
I a woman?" — a line that Frances Dana Gage, a white woman, composed
and attributed to Truth.(27)

Like Stowe and Gage, white academics who take up the texts (and lives
and projects) of people of color for progressive purposes risk exploiting
them for our own insufficiently examined ends. Writing an open letter to
Mary Daly in 1979, Audre Lorde told her, "The history of white women who
are unable to hear Black women's words, or to maintain dialogue with us,
is long and discouraging."(28) Rather than
"ever really read the work of Black women" and other women of color, white
feminists tend to "finger through [such work] for quotations" that they
think will "support an already-conceived idea concerning some old and distorted
connection between us."(29) The question
Lorde asked Daly might be asked of white feminists and white progressives
in general: "Have you read my work, and the work of other Black women,
for what it could give you? Or did you hunt through only to find words
that would legitimize your" own claims about race and racism?(30)

When white scholars strategically quote material by scholars of color
to "support an already-conceived idea," we colonize the work of the Other
to enrich our writing and enhance our authority. Like Stowe, we mine the
lives and writings of people of color to produce a more marketable commodity.(31)
Indeed, even when we are true to the work we study, whites may profit in
ways wholly out of proportion to our historical contribution to the field.
Long before the academy began to accept whiteness as a distinctive area
of research, it had been the subject of countless works of theory, fiction,
art, and journalism by people of color. Although some of the contemporary
scholarship on whiteness by white authors recognizes our indebtedness to
classic and pathbreaking work by James Baldwin, Vine Deloria, Toni Morrison,
and others, whiteness theory nevertheless seems to be "ours."(32)
The very acknowledgement of our racism and privilege can be turned to our
advantage.

"Some of My Best Friends Are . . . "

Rather than struggle with this dilemma, most white scholars (if they consider
the work of scholars of color at all) content themselves with token anti-racist
gestures. For example, white authors seeking to prove that they have done
their homework might include glancing references to Chela Sandoval or Barbara
Smith or Trinh T. Minh-ha, allusions intended to stave off critiques of
the whiteness of the author's research base or working assumptions. Helene
Wenzel calls such defensive moves "ritual libations." "Even when white
women call third world women our friends, and they us, we still agonize
over 'the issue'" of race, Wenzel observes. Fearing an "explosion, we sprinkle
our material with ritual libations which evaporate without altering our
own, or anyone else's consciousness."(33)

Over time, ritualized prostrations and libations may change in style,
but their function remains unaltered. A few years ago, white feminist researchers
routinely included a disclaimer in the introductions to their books saying,
in effect, "Because I am a white, middle-class, middle-aged, able-bodied,
Catholic-raised, heterosexual, widowed, slender, fourth-generation Italian
mother of two, the research in this volume reflects the cultural limitations
of that perspective." The initial acknowledgement of the author's situatedness
meant that she could safely ignore race from then on. More recent authors
may interrupt their texts with occasional forays into racialized analyses;
some feature a lit-review chapter devoted to the writings of scholars of
color; others might offer an extended analysis of a well-known third-world
writer in relation to a white theorist. But the analyses of theorists of
color never enter centrally into what the white authors have to say; they
merely lend an air of racial inclusiveness to white-centered analyses.
"As we see from this close reading of Alice Walker (or Emma Pérez or James
Baldwin), Montessori (or Foucault or Marx) was more completely right than
we even realized."

Underscoring their insider status and with-it-ness, some white scholars
splice comments from friends or acquaintances of color into their conversations
and texts. By prefacing their comments with an attribution like "As my
good friend in Thailand said about the global economy . . . ," white authors
enhance the legitimacy of their analyses. They may even get credit for
a certain humility in thus having learned from a third-world friend. Almost
immediately, however, these authors reposition their own insights at center
stage, for the purpose of such attributions is not to listen but to speak
with augmented authority. Like other authors' attempts to authenticate
their analyses through appeals to the woman or man in the street — "I
once met a working-class black woman who told me that my writing totally
validated her experience!" — attributions of one's preferred analyses
to third-world Others bestow authority by association.

The distinctly retro flavor of appeals to The Genuine Opinion of a Person
of Color should remind us that invoking friendly black and brown opinions
is a longstanding white practice. In a 1966 essay entitled "Some of My
Best Friends Are White," Era Bell Thompson noted that liberal whites liked
being able to quote a black friend on race issues.(34)
(Not-so liberal whites are satisfied with quoting their hired help: "Our
maid is black and she says that blacks want. . . .")(35)
For sophisticated, progressive whites, having an African-American friend
— particularly a "clean-cut Negro, dark but not too dark; smart but not
too forward" — was "a status symbol."(36)
Today, it no longer counts as sophisticated to say, "My good friend, Gloria
Anzaldúa, a Chicana, says that . . ." or "As my much-esteemed colleague,
Evelyn Nakano Glenn, a Japanese American, has pointed out . . . ," but
quoting these scholars' published work in our work does count. Defensive
citation of scholars of color helps prove that white scholars really do
get it, that we have earned the right to speak with authority.(37)
At least superficially, it demonstrates that we are in sync with the analyses
of racism offered by those who suffer from racism.

Most white academics do not read widely across races and, even if we
do, we tend to use the writings of scholars of color to bolster rather
than to interrogate our work. Insofar as we subordinate the work of scholars
of color to our own intellectual projects and career advancement, we tokenize
that scholarship. Tokenism, bell hooks says, means treating the scholarship
of people of color like "a box of chocolates" from which we comfortably
select our favorite bonbons and bons mots.(38)
When white anti-racist researchers borrow the lives and writings of people
of color to authenticate what we have been saying all along about class
relations or progressive pedagogy or moral development, we treat people
of color like trophy friends who validate our pronouncements and help us
appear informed, open minded, and cutting edge. While all scholars "use"
the work of other scholars and no institutionally sponsored scholarship
can escape institutional pressures to publish, there is a difference between
a Dewey scholar who studies other scholars' work and a Dewey scholar
who merely dips into Du Bois to claim him for the Dewey empire. Taking
the work of people of color seriously requires studying their projects,
not just quoting the occasional point that coincides with what we were
going to say anyway. In appropriating black and brown texts to enhance
or revitalize our research and teaching, we rob those texts of their power
to make anti-racist and other meanings in new ways.

Good-White Pedagogies

The tendency to keep white projects and understandings at the center of
anti-racist research also characterizes much of anti-racist education.
Implicitly, many anti-racist and multicultural pedagogies accept white
students' comfort with white ways of knowing: new understanding will not
require new ways of engaging. Most anti-racist and multicultural education,
for example, relies on lectures, articles, history books, novels, films,
and textbooks to provide students with knowledge about other cultures.
"Simply knowing about Indians, African Americans, Asian-Americans,
and Latino/as," Philip Deloria comments, "has become a satisfactory form
of social and political engagement."(39)
More troubling still, cultural pluralism
assumes the knowledge of
the Other that it purports to discover. As Aldon Nielsen observes, the
cultural pluralist who anthologizes or teaches about supposedly representative
African Americans "rewards black writers who speak for that expected [representative]
identity and in the requisite voice." White students, in turn, "discover"
the blackness they already know they will find.(40)
Conversely, white students may dismiss as inauthentic any dimensions of
blackness or brownness that they do not already recognize. Greg Sarris
found that his white students, in repeating a Kashaya Pomo Coyote tale,
usually omitted "the clause about Father God . . . because, according to
students, [this was] 'a Christian concept [that] did not seem Indian.'"(41)

Students who are to do more than assimilate anti-racist and multicultural
education to their existing understandings must not only learn to read
in new ways but must go beyond the texts, for no textual engagement can
do all the work of moving us outside our existing ways of knowing and understanding.(42)
In textual encounters with other communities and individuals, we can maintain
our distance. Face-to-face involvement, on the other hand, calls for a
complex, immediate, and at times uncomfortable kind of responsiveness.
"It is much easier," Troy Richardson and Sofia Villenas point out, to read
a Toni Morrison novel than to "step outside of [the] safe spaces where
[whites] control the terms of engagement" and encounter real people who
"talk back in the flesh."(43) Learning
to respond in such contexts "involves judgment and ethics and feelings
. . . of a new kind than we were raised with." To respond in the ways that
are called for, says Minnie Bruce Pratt, we need to "gather up, not just
information, but the threads of life that connect us to others."(44)
Similarly, Cynthia Dillard observes that "To know something is to have
a living relationship with it, influencing and being influenced by it,
responding to and being responsible for it."(45)

In principle, "white identity" approaches to anti-racist education move
beyond the kind of multicultural pedagogy that is satisfied with exposing
students to non-European cultures.(46)
White identity theories — including white stages-of-development and "allies"
theories — describe the psychological shifts that whites undergo in moving
towards a fully committed form of anti-racism; implicitly or explicitly,
the person at the highest stage of white identity development is an ally
of people of color. The distinctive feature of such approaches is their
emphasis on fostering a positive white anti-racist identity. If "professional
development programs" are to "increase teacher effectiveness with multiracial
populations," Sandra Lawrence and Beverly Tatum believe, they must focus
on the impact that anti-racist and multicultural education "have on the
racial identity development of the participants."(47)
Insofar as white identity is affected, white teachers and students are
not just learning about other races but becoming committed to anti-racism
as part of their own sense of selfhood. In the final stage of white development,
writes Janet Helms, "the person truly values diversity" and "actively seeks
out opportunities to increase the racial diversity in her or his life because
the person recognizes that she or he can learn and grown from such experiences."(48)

The guiding assumptions behind white identity theories are borrowed
from the liberal student-centered tradition, which understands growth in
terms of self-actualization. At "Autonomy," the highest level of development
in the Helms model, whites "no longer rely on people of color to define
Whiteness for them or to validate for them their 'nonracist' status."(49)
Whereas the white person at the fifth stage of development congratulates
herself on being "more enlightened about racial matters than most White
people," the person at the sixth and final stage is "problem centered rather
than self centered" and "proactive rather than reactive" about race issues.(50)
An ally is not a helper, Tatum emphasizes, but someone who, on her
own account, "speak[s] up against systems of oppression" and "challenge[s]
other whites to do the same."(51) The characteristics
assigned to autonomous whites thus set them apart from the needy Tiffanies
and complacent Dr. Lincolns — yet the problematic traits ushered out
the front door are reintroduced at the back. No less than Tiffany or Dr.
Lincoln, the person at the highest stage of white development celebrates
her status as a white person who understands about racism; she merely
asks the theory, rather than individual people of color, "How am I doing?"

Although in principle the person at the highest stage of white development
is self-actualizing and no longer concerns herself with how others see
her, the entire white identity model is organized around individuals getting
to feel good about being white in nonracist ways. The insistence that the
person who reaches the highest stage of white development is indifferent
to her status as an exceptional white person is disingenuous. A moral/political
framework that is organized around white feelings of integrity and self-respect
but denies that this is what the framework is "about" may appear to valorize
the political and social realm. Nevertheless, functionally, the most important
value is being and feeling like a good white person; political action takes
second place to personal integrity. Since feeling good about yourself looks
a little self-centered compared to fighting for social justice, the dual
categorization of value — and thus the dissonance between them — is
suppressed. The person at the highest stages of white racial development
reaps the benefits of feeling good about her whiteness but must remain
ignorant of the raison d'être of the theory that defines her as
fully self-actualized, for otherwise she would count as self-centered rather
than problem-centered and be relegated to stage five. Self-deception and
sentimentality thus are built into the ideal itself.

Despite their commitment to decentering and denormalizing whiteness,
white identity theories keep whiteness at the center of anti-racism. Although
they call upon whites to challenge racism and privilege, their central
preoccupation is with white identity development: anti-racism is organized
around white students' personal growth. Insofar as white students learn
to let go of racial privilege, good-white pedagogies involve loss, but
anti-racist education as a whole is intended to be affirming, enabling,
empowering. From the perspective of such pedagogies, it is crucial that
white students have a positive sense of their whiteness — they should
not have to feel guilty about being white. White guilt is too paralyzing
to be productive, white identity theorists argue. Since whites cannot help
being white, they need to find good ways to be white.

Guilt is indeed paralyzing. But I do not think it follows that the solution
to white guilt is to help whites feel "good." Let me tell you a story that
I hope will show you what I mean. A year or so ago, I spent a couple of
weeks taking care of the children of my friends Howard and Janet, who live
in another state. A few hours after Janet and Howard left, I realized that
they had forgotten to leave me any keys to the house or the car. I knew
that the next-door neighbor had a spare key to the house, but no one had
a spare key to the car, so I phoned my friends' hotel to leave a message
asking them to Fed Ex me the car key. After they got the message, I received
daily, anguished phone calls about how dumb it had been to forget to leave
the key, how guilty they felt, and how lucky it was that I am a bus person
and could make do without a car. During one phone call, Howard urged me,
"Be sure when you talk to Janet that you make her feel better; tell her
it doesn't matter. She feels so guilty, and it's just ruining our vacation."
"There's no need to feel guilty, Howard," I said. "Everything's fine. These
things happen. Stop feeling guilty. Just send me the key."

In reply, Howard suggested various ways to get around the car problem
— maybe call the dealers to see if they had a copy of the key, maybe
ask neighbors for rides to the grocery store and the dentist, maybe ride
bikes or take the bus. "Why don't you just overnight me the key?" I asked.
He hemmed and hawed and finally said, "We're not sending the key. It just
doesn't seem practical. By the time we find somewhere to mail it and everything,
we'd almost be home again. And we just don't want to think about it any
more. It's ruining our vacation." In later phone calls, therefore, I concentrated
on making my friends feel better and assuring them that we were having
fun, that the kids were enjoying the adventure of taking buses and bikes
everywhere, that it was no big deal and not to worry about it. Once I knew
that there was no question of doing anything about the key, I focused
on making our conversations as comfortable as possible. But I did wonder
why alleviating their guilt was the issue. Recently it occurred to me that
there was an analogy here to white guilt about racism. It is not a perfect
analogy, by any means — putting up with racism for a lifetime is not
exactly like having to take the bus for a couple of weeks — but there's
one point I think the two situations may have in common. People of color
are not really interested in daily phone calls about how bad we feel. They
just want us to send the key.(52)

Most white students and faculty who have studied whiteness theories
realize that it is not enough to think critically about race and racism.
We have to make what, to us, will feel like impractical or even painful
sacrifices. What this amounts to for any given individual may not be much.
All too often, the would-be "friend of freedom . . . pauses, calculates,
hesitates."(53) Isabel, a white student
who displayed a sophisticated intellectual understanding of whiteness theory,
told her classmates that she had to be honest: if being a race traitor
meant she might jeopardize her chances of being a professor, she could
not do it. Although she prided herself on her intellectual anti-racism
and counted herself a friend of people of color, she planned to play the
academic game the white way. Such "halfness," as the abolitionists called
it, makes for dangerous allies. In Isabel's case, studying the tools of
whiteness provided her with ways to further exploit her white privilege.
As Alec, Isabel's professor and a man of color, asked, "With allies like
that, who needs enemies?"

Some white students try hard to think of sacrifices they could make.
They ask faculty and students of color for suggestions and they try to
make meaningful progress towards giving things up. But what, to whites,
may seem like significant gestures — "look at all the things I'd be willing
to give up, if I really had to!" — may seem to people of color like nothing
more than new ways for whites to get comfortable with our whiteness. After
listening to his white classmates talk about the sacrifices they could
and could not make, a student of color in one of my classes finally lost
patience. Interrupting the other students, Don told them, "We are not going
to wait around while you all go through your checklists, ticking off this
and ticking off that. 'This I can give up, but that I can't. Maybe I could
give this up, under the right circumstances.' We're not just sitting around
waiting while you all make up your minds what you might someday give up."
As Laura, another student of color, pointed out, the discussion about sacrifice
was a distinctively white way to think about change: social change conceived
in terms of what whites, from their privileged position, were willing to
do, rather than in terms of what needed to be done.

To pursue social justice, we have to decenter whiteness from programs
for social change. Among other things, this means relinquishing our cherished
notions of morality: how we understand fairness, how we understand what
it means to be a good person, how we understand what it means to be generous
or sympathetic or tolerant or a good listener. When we are challenged for
our whiteness, our tendency is to fall back on our goodness, fairness,
intelligence, rationality, sensitivity, and democratic inclusiveness, all
of which are caught up with our whiteness. "How can you call me (me, of
all people!) a racist?" we want to know. And then we add our own challenge:
"These are the moral principles I stand for. Tell me in terms I can understand
what it is I'm doing wrong." And then, if we are told, we do what
my mother-in-law, Naomi Van Laningham, used to call "yebbitting." We say,
"Yeah, but": "Yeah, but do you see how that's not my intention?" "Yeah,
but do you see the reality of the situation, here?" "Yeah, but can you
see it my way?"

The problematic character of white interest in and support for people
of color lies in how we engage nonwhite others. We may listen, but
how do we listen? What are we listening for when we attend to the situations
and experiences of those who are not white? White progressives show "a
touching faith in the talking cure of storytelling," Pakeha (white) New
Zealander Alison Jones says, but all too often it is for our own benefit.(54)
We are looking to enhance our own learning, our own sense of ourselves
as good people, our own pleasure in our knowledge and understanding. As
Caribbean-Canadian feminist Sherene Razack puts it, "we (people
of colour) are always being asked to tell our stories for your (white
people['s]) benefit," stories that "you can't hear because of the
benefit you derive from hearing them."(55)
Part of that benefit, white feminist Megan Boler points out, lies in the
white pleasures of identification and empathy. The empathetic/identification
response, at the same time that it helps "redeem" the white reader, affords
her "the voyeuristic pleasure of listening and judging the other from a
position of power."(56)

In seeking out the voices of marginalized Others, Jones believes, whites
are looking for reassurance, acceptance, and absolution.(57)
Leslie Roman suggests that white "redemption fantasies," in which the good
white "supposedly comes to know and be at one with the 'racialized other'"
and his or her "struggles against racism," may even be a new form of white
privilege.(58) Although she does not argue
that white redemption fantasies necessarily undermine the value of "pan-ethnic
alliances," Roman does see them as "one means by which" whites "create
and sustain" what George Lipsitz has called the "'possessive investment
in whiteness'."(59) Redemption fantasies
such as Schindler's List, Dances with Wolves, Ghosts of
Mississippi, and
Amistad, for example, while they seem to be
"about" the histories of oppressed groups, reposition Christian-born whites
as the stars of the show. In good-white narratives, the political struggles
of oppressed groups serve as a dramatic backdrop to the central moral action
in which the good white guy battles both the bad white guys and his own
conscience. Tragic outcomes for racial minority groups, rather than undercutting
the moral or political meaning of the white hero's actions, add poignancy
to his moral struggles. Even if the racialized Other is doomed, at least
we know that the white guy tried — and that he became a better person
in the process.

White Progressive Principles

Such implicit racial contrasts frame both mainstream and white anti-racist
moralities. As Toni Morrison points out, whites look virtuous or fair or
chaste or generous when nonwhites are assumed as the background.(60)
In conservative white ideology, the racial Other may be characterized as
criminal, undeserving, selfish, or childlike, so that, by contrast, whites
appear moral. White liberal framings, while less likely to demonize people
of color, often treat nonwhites as "interested parties," so that white
actions stand out as those of disinterested, citizen-minded individuals.
Within the terms of such a moral economy, the political acts of people
of color are not especially meaningful as moral action because they are
seen as natural; white actions, however, count as "extras" — in Kantian
language, they are supererogatory. Chicana/os, for example, are assumed
to just naturally take an interest in Chicana/o issues and can even be
blamed a little for doing so, since their interest betrays a lack of neutrality,
a failure to be universal and disinterested in outlook. Whites, by contrast,
are lauded for learning anything about Chicana/os, let alone taking a stand
on their behalf. Anglos who learn Spanish get extra credit, whereas Chicana/os
who speak English and Spanish get negative credit for the Spanish
and second-best credit for the English. (When Chicana/os for whom English
is a primary language are complimented on being "articulate" speakers of
English, the praise is supposed to be valuable because it comes from someone
who really knows how to speak English — someone who doesn't
speak Spanish, someone unafflicted with the language deficit associated
with knowing multiple languages.)

In mainstream white ideologies, ethics pins down meaning, insuring that
moral action is referenced to an abstract ideal rather than a local, particularistic
conception of the good. "In great part," says Marilyn Frye, ours is "an
ethics of forms, procedures and due process."(61)
From the perspective of many whites, the procedural character of this ethics
makes it universally applicable. Under conditions of oppression, however,
idealized and universalized notions of ethics look very different than
they do from the standpoint of privilege.(62)
It is ironic that white liberals and progressives so often appeal to "universal"
moral principles and values as the basis for racial progress, for our morality
is one of the main obstacles to racial change. "Universal" codes of ethics
are the arrangements that make sense to people accustomed to privilege.
Insofar as racial privilege organizes white notions of goodness
and morality, appeals to moral principles and intuitions to guide social
change are likely to be counterproductive.(63)
You can act upon the ideal when what counts as fairness, equity, benevolence,
or caring is organized around your own situation, but it is hard to aspire
to, or want to aspire to, mainstream ideals of morality when those ideals
are geared to the interests of people who hold power over you.

Consider inclusion as a contemporary democratic and educational value.
Inclusion would seem to represent an unproblematically pro-diversity stance
— bringing everyone to the table, preventing homophobes from denying
a voice to lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transsexuals, and disallowing
racial or gender discrimination. But just as colorblindness shields whites
from having to recognize or take responsibility for racist conditions,
inclusion suppresses acknowledgement of conflicting interests. In an analysis
of the race dynamics at a progressive, predominantly white alternative
school, Virginia Chalmers reveals how inclusion, openness, and social harmony
— values appealed to as progressive, anti-racist values — may
be invoked to prevent people of color from organizing amongst themselves.

When Chalmers, a white woman, was appointed director of the Bank Street
College's laboratory School for Children, she found that parents of color,
"although welcomed warmly," were treated as if on "permanent guest status."
"They felt that they were outsiders, expendable and never really able to
influence the core of the institution."(64)
Committed to increasing the involvement of parents of color in her school,
Chalmers set up a potluck dinner meeting for faculty and families of color
on a Friday evening. By Monday, whites were furiously protesting their
exclusion from the dinner. Invoking colorblindness as an inviolate democratic
principle, some of the parents objected to the idea that a context was
needed in which parents of color "could feel 'safe' to get to know each
other and identify areas of common concern."(65)
As one white parent wrote to Chalmers, "I strongly resent the person who
does not even give me the benefit of the doubt and who doesn't feel 'safe'
talking in my presence." Offended by any suggestion that they shared in
the "responsibility for the exclusions people of color experienced at the
school," outraged white parents insisted on their own feelings of
exclusion.(66)

While we might be tempted to think of such examples as aberrations,
supposedly universal ethical systems reliably favor those in power. A universal
ethics may offer accommodation to marginalized groups, but the very gestures
made on behalf of these groups will revert to protect the dominant group
if the balance of power is seen as shifting. At the School for Children,
the principle of inclusion made room for families of color on the condition
that those families accept the established terms of the "community." Inclusion
meant
"on our terms." By gathering separately to explore their distinctive concerns,
parents and faculty of color threatened the dominant group's ability to
control the terms of participation. Whites invoked inclusion to restore
the status quo.

Because white moral principles tend to return us to our standing assumptions
about our goodness as individuals, significant change in our perceptions
is slow. We are deeply invested in the ways we already know how to be good,
in how we already know how to think and make sense. As teachers and students,
we are seduced by our certainty in our own abilities to think critically
and to get it right ("Didn't I just stand up for that black person last
week in the grocery checkout lane?" "Didn't I point out my friend's white
bias to her only the other day?"). We trust profoundly in our ability to
think critically and responsibly about things, and it is this very trust
that betrays us. Whiteness is like advertising. We all know that advertising
is intended to seduce us, to get us to do the wrong thing for the wrong
reason, to get us to feel good and cool and smart while someone else rakes
in tons of money. We know this, but we like to believe that we, as individuals,
are able to withstand the seduction, and we congratulate ourselves on being
among the few critical thinkers able to hold ourselves apart from advertisers'
base appeals to our desires and prejudices. Meanwhile, every other consumer
is thinking exactly the same thing. Meanwhile, Madison Avenue continues
to invest billions of dollars in seducing us and continues to rake in many
more billions of dollars as a result. Someone, somewhere, has to be being
fooled by all of this and of course it is us — it is those of us who
think it can't be us.

An Emergent Approach to Change

Ideals, because they project from and correct for the known, cannot encompass
ways of responding disentangled from who we are now and what we now love
and desire. It is in part because they are referenced to an ideal that
white identity stage theories are so problematic. Whatever their political
or moral agenda, stage theories start from a definite ideal and work backwards.
Usually, the definite ideal is the ideal embodied by the theorist who came
up with the stage model in the first place. Piaget, Kohlberg, and Gilligan
were not assuming some ideal
beyond themselves; they did not consider
themselves to be in the early or middle stages of the developmental models
they were describing. Implicitly, they took themselves to represent the
endpoints of development and then worked backwards to identify the previous
stages as intermediate points on the way to becoming like them. Although
the white stages-of-development models used by Helms, Carter, Howard, Tatum,
Lawrence, and others may not be referenced to the individual researcher
(since not all these researchers are white), they all assume an ideal endpoint
of white racial development.(67) They assume
that we know what it means to be an anti-racist white person.

Whiteness theorists who work with the more radical material and discursive
frameworks generally avoid the "good whites" theme found in the allies
and stages-of-whiteness literature, yet our tendency to think that we know
anti-racism when we see it suggests that we too have definite ideas about
desirable outcomes. Teachers in the race traitor and critical race pedagogy
traditions, for example, are assumed to know what will count as genuine
anti-racist learning on the part of white students.(68)
Probably, anti-racist teachers do know things that will be helpful to their
students and presumably we can provide students with tools, guidance, and
insight. But it is worth asking how we know that our students are
headed in the right direction or that we ourselves are on the right path.
A couple of years ago, I was discussing anti-racist pedagogy with a white
doctoral student who had been studying and teaching anti-racist theories
for many years. When she mentioned how difficult it is for most white students
to accept whiteness theory, I said something to the effect that we had
to be patient, adding, "Look how long it took us to get to where we are
now." "Where are we now?" she asked.(69)

Where, indeed, are we now? My assumption had been that, while we were
at some intermediate point in our journey towards anti-racist understanding,
we definitely were on our way. I still want to think this. But when we
start congratulating ourselves on how far along we are, it is easy to stop
thinking of ourselves as on a journey and start thinking of ourselves as
having arrived. Not only have we not arrived but we cannot know, either
in a pragmatic or in a visionary sense, what the end of the journey looks
like. What will come to count as anti-racist will change as we take on
new lived possibilities.(70) Progressive
whites do know about some things that are racist, yet it is doubtful whether
we have much of an idea as to what, a century from now, will appear most
shocking about race relations today.(71)
Still less can we claim to know about things that are not racist
or that specifically undo racism and make room for something new, something
"post-racism."

Anti-racist traditions provide us with useful critiques of existing
situations, but tools developed to challenge racism will not always serve
equally well to envision new racial possibilities. Critical tools are shaped
to an important degree by the relations they are meant to disrupt. If we
are to pursue as yet unimagined possibilities, we cannot rely on procedures
and blueprints geared to what we know at present; we have to start by changing
what is. Emergent approaches to change take up the possibilities found
in change itself. Using the best tools available thus far to begin
to shift our perceptions, investments, and involvements, they seek to alter
situations enough so that, from the resulting experience and understanding,
we can explore fresh possibilities of responsiveness.(72)

In the 1960s and 1970s, for example, white feminists often refused to
allow men to open doors for them — a political act that, to many young
women today, looks like not only an old-fashioned but a pointless form
of political correctness. Its point cannot be grasped by referring it to
an ideal, however, for it was not meant to establish once and for all who
should open doors for whom. Instead, the gesture was intended to interrupt
an elaborate sexist, heterosexist, and racist etiquette called chivalry
that said that white men would wait on white (and only white) women
to the extent of opening doors for them, if those women would continue
to make the coffee, wash the men's socks, type their letters, defer to
them, and accept the need for their protection. (At the time, many white
men complained that they did not know what women wanted; they further pointed
out that they themselves were acting only with the best intentions. Their
discomfort was not unlike that of whites today who wish that people of
color would just make up their minds as to what they want to be called.)
Second-wave feminists' refusal to allow men to open the door for them was
not meant to substitute a utopian door-opening etiquette for an oppressive
one but to destabilize the old sexual code enough to allow for new values
to emerge. Once that goal was served, this particular political gesture
looked as quaint as first-wave feminists' bloomers.

Performatively trying on new assumptions about what is appropriate,
reasonable, and fair makes it possible for us to develop new embodied values;
in time, these temporary, working values may give place to values that
we cannot yet imagine. How might those of us who are most privileged learn
to listen differently in classrooms and at conferences, for example, if
we let go of universalistic ideals of turn-taking inclusiveness? What might
we hear, if we did? During the questions-and-comments period of a conference
session last year, a white male professor in the audience politely checked
to see if anyone else had a comment to make before raising his hand; aware
of the propensity of white men to claim the floor, he remarked self-mockingly,
"I did wait thirty seconds before speaking." A white female professor in
the audience saw his irony and raised it. "Why thirty seconds?" she asked.
"Why not a hundred years?" Like our turn-taking etiquette, the family and
institutional stories we tell about merit and meaning often assume that
universal, colorblind rules are fair. "My grandfather came to this country
with nothing and . . . "; "My family suffered for what they have";(73)
"Standards for this conference have been slipping. We need to get back
to rigorous, discipline-based criteria." How might whites come to listen
if we set aside those narratives? How might we learn to listen if we gave
up the need to feel like and to be seen as good whites?

Growth, Loss, and Risk

When old values prove false, the loss we feel in giving up the sense of
selfhood tied to those values is painful. More than most other anti-racist
theorists, feminist and especially lesbian theorists have confronted the
embodied character of white privilege, along with the grief and loss that
accompany significant change in ways of being white.(74)
In contrast with student-centered educators who emphasize the achievement
of a stronger, more integrated sense of white selfhood as the measure of
white, anti-racist growth, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Marilyn Frye, and María
Lugones and Elizabeth Spelman point out that growth in understanding is
no guarantee of an enhanced, improved, or better integrated sense of self.
Whites cannot count on "coming out of the [unlearning-white-privilege]
task whole, with a self that is not as fragile as the selves of those who
have been the victims of racism."(75) Although
Pratt speaks to the exhilaration of new challenges and discoveries, her
experience is not one of simple growth. "Because I was implicated
in the doing of some of these injustices, and I held myself, and my people,
responsible," she says, "what my expanded understanding meant was that
I felt in a struggle with myself, against myself. This breaking through
did not feel like liberation but like destruction."(76)
"I felt like my life was cracking around me."(77)

The keenness with which whites feel the loss of our best selves is captured
in Marilyn Frye's grief at the inadequacy of her sincere efforts to be
anti-racist:

All of my ways of knowing seemed to have failed me — my perception,
my common sense, my good will, my anger, honor and affection, my intelligence
and insight. . . . Simple things like courtesy or giving money, attending
a trial, working on a project initiated by women of color, or dissenting
from racist views expressed in white company bec[a]me fraught with possibilities
of error and offense. If you want to do good, and you don't know good from
bad, you can't move.(78)

By accentuating positive versions of whiteness, white identity theorists
hope to save well-meaning whites from this sense of paralysis. Yet Frye
moves beyond her impasse not by seizing upon some reassuring ideal of goodness
but by accepting that we have to invent new forms of responsiveness. "We
have to practice new ways of being in environments which nurture
different habits of feeling, perception, and thought," she says, and we
have to create these environments ourselves.(79)

Like Frye, Pratt does not see new ways of being in the world as a matter
of acquiring new principles or new identity constructs, but as a question
of learning new, embodied forms of responsiveness. "When we discover truths
about our home culture," she acknowledges, "we may fear we are losing our
self: our self-respect, our self-importance."(80)
To regain our self-respect, "we need to find new ways to be in the world,
those very actions a way of creating a positive self."(81)
Pratt's "refusal to allow guilt to trap her within the boundaries of a
coherent 'white' identity . . . makes it possible for her to make the effort
to educate herself about the histories of her own and other peoples."(82)
As Biddy Martin and Chandra Talpade Mohanty see it, "What differentiates
her narration of her development from other feminist narratives of political
awakening is its tentativeness, its consisting of fits and starts, and
the absence of linear progress toward a visible end."(83)
Because "there is an irreconcilable tension between the search for a secure
place from which to speak" and "the price at which secure places are bought"
— "the exclusions, the denials, the blindnesses on which they are predicated"
— she does not sacrifice her search for meaning to a search for security.(84)

For both Pratt and Frye, the first major step towards change is giving
up the need to control meaning. Like Pratt, who "was taught to be a judge,"
Frye had "learned that I, and 'we,' knew right from wrong and had the responsibility
to see to it right was done; that there were others who did not know what
is right and wrong and should be advised, instructed, helped and directed
by us."(85) This authoritativeness has
particular resonance where the meaning of race is concerned. Historically,
whites have been able to say what counted as racial identity, when it mattered,
and when it didn't.(86) But while whites
continue to "actively legislate matters of race membership" and can overlook
or redesignate race strategically, the category "race" no longer serves
white purposes as conveniently as it used to.(87)
Our loss of control over the category may account for some of the frustration
whites feel at having to name ourselves as white. The insistence on feeling
good about ourselves and projecting ourselves as "good whites" is in part
a determination to tell the story of our whiteness our own way — to be
in control of the racial meanings used to identify us. It is a way, as
Elizabeth Ellsworth says, of "having the last word."(88)

Giving up the desire to define ourselves unproblematically as good whites
is a necessary step in pursuing an emergent sense of what it might mean
to be an anti-racist white. White-identified or "whitely" whites, Frye
says, "have a staggering faith in their own rightness and goodness, and
that of other whitely people," and this overwhelming faith in ourselves
seems to be specifically protected in anti-racist pedagogies that culminate
in a good white identity.(89) We need to
trouble the expectation that we can know exactly what will count as anti-racist
in every situation and thus can always act blamelessly. When we insist,
in advance, on an outcome that guarantees that we will feel good about
ourselves — that guarantees we will feel growth without loss — we refuse
the possibility of a response. "Speaking," says African-American playwright
and actor Anna Deavere Smith, "calls for risk." It "calls for a sense of
what one has to lose."(90) Knowing the
right answers in advance confines morality and politics to a narrow place.
As Pratt reminds us, we have "to widen the place of change."(91)

Inconclusion

In challenging the emphasis that progressive and well-meaning whites place
on our status as allies and friends of people of color, my intent is not
to treat guilt, inadequacy, and anxiety as preferable to feeling good about
one's whiteness. Guilt is indeed, as white identity theorists charge, debilitating.
But it is also an artifact of a particular way of
framing the problem.
When my friends Howard and Janet decided that sending the car key was unrealistic,
they assumed a particular view of the situation: they saw it as acceptable,
if unfortunate, and as more or less fixed. Although they genuinely felt
bad because the kids and I were inconvenienced, it seemed to them that,
"realistically," there was nothing that they could do. Accordingly, they
stressed their stupidity in having forgotten to leave the key. Whereas
a sense of responsibility might have led them to take some definite
action to change the situation, their sense of guilt concentrated
their attention on themselves and their need to feel better. The guilt-ridden
response says, "You think
you feel bad? How do you think I
feel?" Howard's and Janet's pain placed their own feelings, rather than
the situation, at center stage. Covertly, their guilt also served to exonerate
them. Guilt mourns a past that cannot be changed; since clearly it would
have been wrong for me to blame them for something that was merely an oversight,
their guilt carried the seeds of their absolution.

Although the stakes are very different in white racial guilt, the mechanics
are in many ways the same. Born into a racist society, we find ourselves
thrown into a situation — caught up in a tangle of racial meanings that
are not originally of our own making. This thrownness is part of what frustrates
well-meaning whites: we did not choose to be born white in a racist
society. We do not now wish to choose whiteness or racism, but there they
are, part of our world; so we try to distance ourselves from them, to show
that we would unchoose them if we could. White guilt mourns genocide, slavery,
land theft, lynchings, and broken promises as part of a past that can no
longer be changed — and in so doing seeks to return to an imagined innocence.
Since the past cannot be changed, we insist on being allowed to feel good
about ourselves. Yet this is a solution only if the problem is white
helplessness rather than racism. Taking on the alleviation of white guilt
as an anti-racist project keeps whiteness at the center of anti-racism.

Our stumbling block is that we want to be unambiguously — as we have
always been — in the right. What makes whites so anxious, Ellsworth observes,
is the feeling that you are "damned if you do, damned if you don't."(92)
Trying to be anti-racist, trying to be an ally, seems to catch us hopelessly
ensnared in the fantasy of being an exceptional white person — yet, at
the same time, we do not want to be racists. Confirming white anxiety about
whether it is possible to do the right thing in a racist social order,
black feminist Pat Parker's poem, "For the White Person Who Wants to Know
How to Be My Friend," begins with this advice: "The first thing you do
is to forget that i'm Black./ Second, you must never forget that i'm Black."(93)
As Parker suggests, the contradictions of anti-racism are inescapable.
The very status of anti-racism as anti- means that those of us who
want to confront and challenge racism in ourselves, in institutions, and
in others, can never forget race or racism but also cannot be trapped by
it; we cannot allow it to be reified as meaningful in the particular ways
we have learned to understand it. To want to be a friend in the ways that
we already know how to be a friend, and to want to be an ally of people
of color as a way of being in the right, is to insist on the authoritativeness
of our existing conceptions of understanding and responsiveness. The desire
to be seen as a friend substitutes for the engagements and ways of knowing
required to be a friend.

Ironically, the sentimental ideas about race found in decades-old children's
books are reflected in much of contemporary white anti-racist thought in
the academy. White children's books intended to show cross-race relations
in a positive light commonly invoke friendship as a sentimental ideal without
addressing the kinds of understanding and responsiveness needed for friendship
to be meaningful. At the end of Squanto: Friend of the Pilgrims,
having found that his Wampanoag clan has been wiped out in his absence,
Squanto decides to live with the white community as "a friend to these
people." But his story is not yet complete, for, abruptly, two fictional
white children appear — introduced, apparently, for the purposes of drawing
a distinction between good and bad whites and promising a future in which
the good whites will do their best. When Squanto says aloud, "This
is my home again," the little white boy chastises him for "talking to the
trees." "A tree doesn't know what you are saying," the white boy says scornfully.
"But the little girl," the author tells us, "put her hand in Squanto's,
as if she understood."(94) The little white
girl, we like to think, is us. Whereas the boy represents the ordinary
white person, arrogant and condescending in his ignorance about the Other,
the girl represents the exceptional, innocent bystander. Sympathetic and
supportive, she lets Squanto know that she is on his side. It is not clear
if she fully understands, but she puts her hand in his
as if she
understands.(95)

Notes

1. Clyde Robert Bulla, Squanto: Friend of the White
Men, illus. Peter Burchard (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1954).
Reissued as Squanto: Friend of the Pilgrims (New York: Scholastic,
1982). Ironically, the new title is less accurate than the original. Most
of the white men in the story are Englishmen who come to North America
to trade and who then return to England; the pilgrims do not make an appearance
until almost the last chapter.

2. Lela and Rufus Waltrip, "Pocahontas: Friend of
the Colonists," in Indian Women: Thirteen Who Played a Part in the History
of America from Earliest Days to Now (New York: David McKay Co., 1964),
17-27.

3. In 1870, General George Custer said that "the
[white] Army is the Indian's best friend." Quoted in The Experts Speak:
The Definitive Compendium of Authoritative Misinformation, rev. ed.,
ed. Christopher Cerf and Victor Navasky (New York: Villard, 1998), 304.

4. In children's literature, the theme of whites
as friends and saviors of people of color became a staple of what Sims
calls the "social conscience" literature of the fifties and sixties. See
Rudine Sims, Shadow and Substance: Afro-American Experience in Contemporary
Children's Fiction (Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English,
1982). Although most anti-racist children's literature has moved beyond
this theme, Hollywood recently has emphasized cross-race friendship. The
friendship of white men for black men, especially, is a recurring theme
in contemporary movies. See Benjamin DeMott, The Trouble with Friendship:
Why Americans Can't Think Straight about Race (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1995/1998).

5. "Tiffany" is a composite figure, not a real person.
Wherever I have used just a first name in reference to someone, either
the name has been changed or the person represents a composite. In one
case, I used a last name for a composite figure ("Dr. Lincoln") in order
to summon particular mythic-historical associations.

6. Although whites do not necessarily feel like a
"we" and many whites would object that there is no coherent we-ness to
whiteness as a category, I use "we" to work against the comfortable belief
that "I" am not like other whites and therefore do not belong in the same
pronoun with "them." In this essay, "we" sometimes refers specifically
to white feminists; more often, "we" refers generally to progressive white
university researchers and teachers. (Because white anti-racist doctoral
students may have studied race issues in some depth, and because advanced
graduate students occupy teaching and research positions in the academy,
I group them with professors rather than with students.)

7. For example, white school teachers and student
teachers often complain about the "racism" of students of color — especially
African-American students — who are guarded or hostile towards white
teachers they barely know or have only just met. As Julie Kailin points
out, however, school hallways are "often the only place where some White
teachers ha[ve] contact with Black students," and in those contexts, black
students may learn nothing about the teachers except that they are
policing them. "How White Teachers Perceive the Problem of Racism in Their
Schools: A Case Study in 'Liberal' Lakeview," Teachers College Record
100, no. 4 (Summer 1999): 733. While white teachers resent black students
making judgments about them without knowing them, many such teachers fear
and avoid contact with black students. Others do not "bother to try to
get to know the Black students' names unless they [a]re going to 'write
them up'." Since white students in the hallways are not policed to anything
like the same degree as black students, the latter see the teachers in
question as racist even though the teachers may think that they are merely
doing their jobs. When white teachers abandon their distrustful policing
role vis à vis black students, they may find that those students in turn
become much more "friendly" (734).

8. I borrowed this formulation from Deanna Blackwell,
who used it to characterize white objections to noncolorblind anti-racism.

9. This is a different question from whether a
white person can be the friend of a person of color. Here, I am
focusing specifically on the universal "friend," as in "good guy" or "ally."
Even intimate friendship, though, is not safe from racism. As Lerone Bennett,
Jr., suggests, such a relationship may "transcend" racism without destroying
it. "To rise above the situation, to transcend it, to impose on it new
levels of meaning and significance: this is a private solution available
to marginal individuals on the margins of the culture. But it is a private
solution, and private enclaves are terribly vulnerable as long as the situation
of oppression remains whole and individuals retain roots in the mutually
exclusive worlds of the oppressed and the oppressor." "Tea and Sympathy:
Liberals and Other White Hopes," in The Negro Mood (Chicago: Johnson
Publishing, 1964), 92-93. White wieldings of tropes such as cross-race
friendship, racial diversity, racial fluidity, and border crossing tend
to ignore whites' rootedness in exclusionary and oppressive white
worlds, preferring to concentrate on our capacity to travel to other worlds
in our imagination.

10. In some cases, whole departments set themselves
up in this way. It is easy to think that you as a faculty group are more
or less through with the anti-racist project if your stance is not "Where
do we go from here?" but "Is there any department more diverse than ours?!"

11. American Psychological Association, Publication
Manual of the American Psychological Association, 4th ed. (Washington,
DC: American Psychological Association, 1994), 163. The common abbreviation
for the book is APA Manual.

12. APA, Publication Manual, 6. In 1999,
QSE
considered the limitations of APA style for its own authors and readers.
See Nancy Zeller and Frank M. Farmer, "'Catchy, Clever Titles Are Not Acceptable':
Style, APA, and Qualitative Reporting," International Journal of Qualitative
Studies in Education 12, no. 1 (January-February 1999): 3-19. Although
I do not discuss the whiteness of the APA guidelines here, I offer this
paper in part as a contribution to the questions about format raised in
that article.

13. Some of our attempts to persuade students of
a particular racial analysis involve rendering them defenseless against
Reason. Using our superior analytical and argumentative tools and skills
to prove students wrong seems to me a form of violence rather than of education.
No doubt violence is necessary in some — perhaps even many — cases
of white defensiveness, but I am interested in exploring what it might
mean to avoid the dichotomous choices of either arguing students into submission
through a top-down pedagogy or wooing them into compliance through a student-centered,
bottom-up approach to racial enlightenment.

14. A relational voice and a confessional stance
are not mutually exclusive — Minnie Bruce Pratt's powerful interweaving
of the two in "Identity: Skin Blood Heart" is testimony to their compatibility.
(In Yours in Struggle: Three Feminist Perspectives on Anti-Semitism
and Racism, by Elly Bulkin, Minnie Bruce Pratt, and Barbara Smith [New
York: Long Haul Press, 1984], 11-63.) But frequently a confessional voice
is used in preference to a voice that might offer an invitation to conversation;
in some cases the intimate, confessional voice even serves as a badge of
authenticity, an instant corrective to academic impersonality. In such
cases, the personal voice is not an invitation to a conversation but a
statement — less negotiable, even, than statements made in the name of
objectivity.

15. Robert Madigan, Susan Johnson, and Patricia
Linton, "The Language of Psychology: APA Style as Epistemology," American
Psychologist 50, no. 6 (June 1995): 428. As these authors note, discursive
notes are common in humanities journals. Whereas the APA Manual
claims to have determined that most readers find footnotes distracting,
Robert Connors claims that "most people agree that" discursive notes should
be on the same page as the text to which they refer. (Not surprisingly,
this also turns out to be his own preference.) Although the journal in
which his article appeared specifies the endnote rather than footnote format,
he received special dispensation to use footnotes rather than endnotes
because the former "allow . . . for a text/note dialogism." Robert J. Connors,
"The Rhetoric of Citation Systems, Part I: The Development of Annotation
Structures from the Renaissance to 1900," Rhetoric Review 17, no.
1 (Fall 1998): 6. My own sense is that both footnotes and endnotes allow
for text/note dialogism, albeit in different ways. Some readers go back
and forth between text and notes; others read first the text and then the
endnotes straight through. Both systems provide "a second, parallel text."
I am not in a position to say which of these approaches "most" people prefer.
However, readerly preferences may not be the primary consideration, if
an author is trying to engage readers in unaccustomed ways.

16. When trying to devise tools that will perform
new functions, my partner, a computer software engineer, constantly runs
into this problem: "The tool most required to build the tool required is
the tool required." (Ivan Van Laningham, recurring personal communication.)
Because the only tools at present available are adapted to older ideas
and assumptions, it is hard to invent something really new with
them; but to get tools adapted for other purposes, you would first have
to invent them. So you are in a regressive bind — unable to get going
on the new till you have something new. A similar problem confronts
anti-racist educators attempting to challenge and undo white privilege.
Because we tend to rely on the older intellectual and pedagogical tools
provided by such familiar progressive approaches to anti-oppressive education
as critical pedagogy, student-centered education, and multiculturalism,
we keep finding ourselves with the same questions and the same inadequate
solutions. We are trying to fix racism with tools that were constructed,
in part, to rationalize and/or correct for racism — not tools that are
organized around ideas that we have yet to fully understand. This essay
is an attempt to move in more emergent directions, to shift ground so that
we can begin to develop new tools articulated to new understandings.

17. Whiteness theories decenter and denormalize
whiteness; revealing whiteness as unearned privilege, they displace it
from its status as invisible norm. Like Latina/o and African-American studies,
feminist theory, and other umbrella terms, whiteness theory encompasses
a variety of disciplinary and political approaches. I view the four main
strands as analyzing whiteness in material terms (bodily, environmental,
economic, etc.); discursive terms (referenced to texts, popular culture,
language, ideology, etiquette, etc.); institutional terms (in some ways
an intersection between material and discursive analyses, focusing on the
ways in which racialized values and perceptions are systematized into law,
policy, and formal working relations, for example); and personal and relational
terms (such as psychological moral stages of development, a commitment
to being a white ally of people of color, working through and deconstructing
personal histories of whiteness, and recognizing one's personal privileges
as a white person). The scholarly literature on whiteness is far too large
to cite, but the following books and articles represent some of the best-known
work in the field: Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey, eds., Race Traitor
(New York: Routledge, 1996); Peggy McIntosh, "White Privilege: Unpacking
the Invisible Knapsack," Peace and Freedom (July/August, 1989):
10-12; Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary
Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1992); David R. Roediger, The Wages
of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London:
Verso, 1991); and Christine E. Sleeter, "White Silence, White Solidarity,"
Race
Traitor 4 (Winter 1995): 14-22.

18. Responding to Patricia Hill Collins' presentation
of her paper, "On Moms, Mammies, Madonnas, and Matriarchs: Racism, Nationalism,
and Motherhood," a surprising number of white women in the audience insisted
that they themselves were nonracist but that they had to fight their husbands'
racism in rearing their children. The women seemed nonplussed by Collins'
response, which was (roughly), "Why do you stay married to racist men?"
Collins' paper was presented at the University of Utah, in Salt Lake City,
on March 1, 1993.

19. Dreama Moon discusses the pattern of white women
pointing to the racism of their families as a way to highlight their own
non-racism in "White Enculturation and Bourgeois Ideology: The Discursive
Production of 'Good (White) Girls'," in Whiteness: The Communication
of Social Identity, ed. Thomas K. Nakayama and Judith N. Martin (Thousand
Oaks, CA: Sage Pub., 1999), 177-97. Kathy Hytten and John Warren discuss
such moves in terms of a "discourse of friends and family" that not only
"show[s] how enlightened or open-minded" the speakers are in comparison
to their families and peers, but effectively blames their environments
for whatever racist tendencies the speakers do have. See "Engaging Whiteness:
How Racial Power Gets Reified in Education" (manuscript).

22. One consequence that I do not address here,
but that deserves careful consideration, is the question of how faculty
and students of color may experience whites' self-naming as anti-racist.
As my colleagues William Smith and Frank Margonis have pointed out, when
white faculty acknowledge their complicity in institutional and other forms
of racism by calling themselves "racist," they may fail to send a message
of explicit support to faculty and students of color in predominantly white
institutions. This would-be anti-racist practice also may confuse white
students who are trying to figure out whether it is possible to be white
and anti-racist.

23. Collins, Fighting Words, 69.

24. Although I focus here on white appropriations
of black bodies and stories, related points could be made about the cooptation
of Asian, Pacific Islander, American Indian, Chicana/o, and other groups'
bodies, words, songs, and symbols. For example, Philip J. Deloria details
many of the ways in which American Indian culture and spirituality have
been appropriated. Ironically, he says, even as non-Indians embrace an
essentialized Indianness, they often ignore actual Indians. Thus, "the
late Washington Redskins owner Jack Kent Cooke insisted that the name [Redskins]
honors rather than degrades native people," despite Indians' continued
protests about the name over the course of nearly two decades. Playing
Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 174. New Age and other
countercultural versions of American Indian spiritualism, although well
intentioned, also have had little to do with Indian people. Like their
"counterparts in communalism, politics, and environmentalism," Deloria
says, such forms of spiritualism have "rarely engaged real Indians, for
it was not only unnecessary but inconvenient to do so" (169). Also speaking
to the issue of cultural cooptation, Guillermo Gómez-Peña comments that
"border theory" has been necessary to Mexican identity for "at least two
hundred years," whereas "for the United States, the border was more interesting
as a metaphor, as a cultural fashion." He refers to this appropriation
of exotic Mexican metaphors as the "cholo-chic syndrome." The comment is
made in a dialogue with Coco Fusco in Fusco's English Is Broken Here:
Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas (New York: The New Press,
1995), 162.

31. Both Collins and Painter speak of the commodification
of black texts and of the use of black texts to inject exotic interest
into white arguments and analyses. Revitalizing whiteness through recourse
to "primitive" blackness and brownness is a longstanding theme in critiques
of white appropriations of African-American and American Indian imagery.
Also speaking to the commodification of the Other, Philip Deloria remarks
on how "Indianness — even when imagined as something essential — could
be captured and marketed as a text, largely divorced from Indian oversight
and questions of authorship." Playing Indian, 170. Culture becomes
property, something to be "purchased, interpreted, mastered, and materialized"
(171).

36. Having too many of these white friends could
get to be something of a burden for black professionals. As one man put
it, "Since the white people discovered me, I never get a minute's rest.
Every week my wife and I are invited to their homes. It's gotten so bad
that I just have to say no, to remind them that I have colored friends
too." Thompson, "Some of My Best Friends Are White," 157.

37. In keeping with the institutional premium placed
on academic expertise and authority, defensive citation answers the question,
"Have you done your homework?" By contrast, archival citation answers the
question, "Are your citations an intellectual resource for others doing
work in this area?" The two types of citation are not mutually exclusive
— citations may be at once defensive and archival — but in many cases
they will be addressed to different ends. Defensive citation performs an
important intellectual function insofar as it shows how one's work is informed
by and grounded in a particular scholarly literature, but too often it
merely pays ritualized obeisance to the reigning authorities in a field
or accords important newcomers a nod of recognition. In the worst forms
of defensive citation, scholars make obvious claims like "Racism is a profound
problem," then scrupulously back up the claim with one or two names like
W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, and Angela Davis. Usually, that is the
last we ever hear from Du Bois, Fanon, or Davis. Whereas the purpose of
defensive citation is to honor the genealogy of ideas and to show that
the writer is not just making it all up, archival citation is meant to
introduce readers to other material that speaks to a given issue, pulling
readers into the larger political and intellectual conversation. In mainstream
scholarship, explanatory notes and parenthetical remarks may be considered,
by definition, to be extraneous to the text: if something cannot be said
in the text itself, it counts as an unfortunate interruption and therefore
should be omitted. In countercultural and even in popular scholarship,
however, parenthetical remarks, explanatory asides, and archival notes
can be indispensable means of showing readers what they need to be aware
of, to be part of the conversation. Extratextual material comments self-consciously
on the context in which claims are being set forth. Ironically, the absence
of attention to metacritiques and subtexts in mainstream academic work
serves to bolster the appearance of straightforward, objective, impersonal,
scientific truth. On this last point, see Avon Crismore and Rodney Fransworth,
"Metadiscourse in Popular and Professional Science Discourse," in The
Writing Scholar: Studies in Academic Discourse, ed. Walter Nash (Newbury
Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1990), 118-36.

40. Aldon L. Nielsen, Writing between the Lines:
Race and Intertextuality (Athens: The University of Georgia Press,
1994), 20. In many cases, this means discovering an exotic or pathological
blackness, or at least a blackness that is unquestionably Other. For example,
Avtar Brah and Rehana Minhas note the tendency for Western feminist educators
who teach about non-Westerners to select teaching materials that highlight
the kind of sexism paradigmatically associated with non-European-based
cultures. "Structural Racism or Cultural Difference: Schooling for Asian
Girls," in Just a Bunch of Girls: Feminist Approaches to Schooling,
ed. Gaby Weiner (Milton Keynes, England: Open University Press, 1985),
23-24.

41. Greg Sarris, "Storytelling in the Classroom:
Crossing Vexed Chasms," in Keeping Slug Woman Alive: A Holistic Approach
to American Indian Texts (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1993), 152.

42. On reading in ways that go against the grain
of racism and ethnocentrism, see Morrison,
Playing in the Dark;
Nielsen, Writing between the Lines; María Lugones, "Hablando Cara
a Cara/Speaking Face to Face: An Exploration of Ethnocentric Racism," in
Making
Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by
Women of Color, ed. Gloria Anzaldúa (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Foundation
Books, 1990), 46-54; Greg Sarris, "Keeping Slug Woman Alive: The Challenge
of Reading in a Reservation Classroom," in Keeping Slug Woman Alive:
A Holistic Approach to American Indian Texts (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1993), 169-99; and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "How
to Teach a 'Culturally Different' Book," in The Spivak Reader: Selected
Works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ed. Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean
(New York: Routledge, 1999), 237-66.

45. Cynthia B. Dillard, "The Substance of Things
Hoped for, the Evidence of Things Not Seen: Examining an Endarkened Feminist
Epistemology in Educational Research and Leadership,"
International
Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 13, no. 6 (2000): 673.

46. I use the terms "white identity," "good-white,"
"allies," "developmental" and "stage theory" approaches to whiteness more
or less interchangeably insofar as these orientations focus on the affirmation
of a "good" white identity. Almost all such theories are based on the stage
model for white anti-racist development described in Janet E. Helms, "Toward
a Model of White Racial Identity Development," in Black and White Racial
Identity: Theory, Research, and Practice, ed. Janet E. Helms (Westport,
CT: Greenwood Press, 1990), 49-66; and Janet E. Helms, A Race Is a Nice
Thing to Have: A Guide to Being a White Person or Understanding the White
Persons in Your Life (Topeka, KS: Content Communications, 1992). For
examples of white identity theories, see Robert T. Carter, "White Racial
Identity," in The Influence of Race and Racial Identity in Psychotherapy
(New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1995), 100-14; Robert T. Carter, "Is
White a Race? Expressions of White Racial Identity," in Off White: Readings
on Race, Power, and Society, ed. Michelle Fine, Lois Weis, Linda C.
Powell, and L. Mun Wong (New York: Routledge, 1997), 198-209; Beverly Daniel
Tatum, "Talking about Race, Learning about Racism: The Application of Racial
Identity Development Theory in the Classroom," Harvard Educational Review
62, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 1-24; Beverly Daniel Tatum, "Teaching White Students
about Racism: The Search for White Allies and the Restoration of Hope,"
Teachers
College Record 95, no. 4 (Summer 1994): 462-76; Beverly Daniel Tatum,
"Why
Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?" and Other Conversations
about Race (New York: Basic Books, 1997); Sandra M. Lawrence and Beverly
Daniel Tatum, "Teachers in Transition: The Impact of Antiracist Professional
Development on Classroom Practice," Teachers College Record 99,
no. 1 (Fall 1997): 162-78; Sandra M. Lawrence and Beverly Daniel Tatum,
"White Teachers as Allies: Moving from Awareness to Action," in Off
White, 333-42; and Gary R. Howard, We Can't Teach What We Don't
Know: White Teachers, Multiracial Schools (New York: Teachers College
Press, 1999).

47. Lawrence and Tatum, "White Teachers as Allies,"
335.

48. Helms, Race Is a Nice Thing to Have,
87.

49. Helms, Race Is a Nice Thing to Have,
87-88.

50. Helms, Race Is a Nice Thing to Have,
73, 90, 91.

51. Tatum, "Teaching White Students about Racism,"
474.

52. I do not mean for the key to be read too
metaphorically, in the sense that there is a key that will unlock
racism if only whites will relinquish it. My focus, here, is less on structural
issues like material privilege and more on issues of whiteness local to
academic relations — the organization of the curriculum, control of academic
standards, access to particular projects, and use of particular styles
of communication, for example. Just as, in the story, the key was something
that I was assumed not to really need, something it would be too
inconvenient and impractical to send, the metaphorical racial key refers
to changes that we are not prepared to make because we see the cost to
ourselves as outweighing any value to others.

53. Bennett, "Tea and Sympathy," 78.

54. Alison Jones, "The Limits of Cross-Cultural
Dialogue: Pedagogy, Desire, and Absolution in the Classroom," Educational
Theory 49, no. 3 (Summer 1999): 306. The white students in Jones's
study benefit from cross-race classroom interaction in a way that students
of color do not. Also speaking to the benefit that white students derive
from interaction with students of color is Octavio Villalpando's study
of "approximately 200 Chicana/o and 200 white college students from 40
universities throughout the U. S.," which found that Chicana/o and white
students alike benefit from interacting primarily with Chicana/o students.
Specifically, their "socially-conscious values, their pursuit of careers
in service of their community, and their involvement in community service
activities" are all positively influenced. "But, when white students interact
primarily with other white students, they do not derive any of the benefits
accrued from interacting with Chicana/os." "Self-Segregation or Self-Preservation?
A Critical Race Theory and Latina/o Critical Theory Analysis of a Study
of Chicana/o College Students," International Journal of Qualitative
Studies in Education (in press).

55. Sherene H. Razack, "Storytelling for Social
Change," in Returning the Gaze: Essays on Racism, Feminism and Politics,
ed. Himani Bannerji (Toronto: Sister Vision Press, 1993), 92. Referring
to the homeless, Patricia Williams also speaks to the issue of failing
to hear because of the benefit we derive from hearing the Other's
story. A stockbroker tells Williams that he never gives money to people
who beg on the streets, but does "always stop to chat." He engages the
homeless in conversation, he says, to remind himself of their humanity
and also because it helps him not "resent their presence on the streets
of my neighborhood so much." Williams wonders "whom it helps when he stops
to reassure himself of a humanity unconnected to any concerted recognition
of hunger or need." Alchemy of Race and Rights, 17.

62. The U. S. Government, for example, as part of
its "forced 'great experimental' civilization program," sought to eradicate
traditional Cherokee ways and to replace them with white values. "White
man's ethics were rammed down their throats in the name of conformity,
and to destroy tribal life-ways." Bird, Tell Them They Lie, 14,
15. On the whiteness of "universal" ethics, also see Woodson, Mis-Education
of the Negro; and Katie G. Cannon, Black Womanist Ethics (Atlanta:
Scholar's Press, 1988).

63. The tendency for whiteness to organize moral
perception extends to the perceptions of non-whites as well as whites.
Drawing on work by Rizzo-Tolk and Varenne, Margaret Eisenhart describes
a classroom in which "poor and minority students were engaged in an exploration
of homelessness." She notes that "although they learned to be more sympathetic
to the homeless (a goal of the curriculum), they did not also unlearn the
culturally stereotyped, negative view of homelessness pervasive in wider
U.S. society." They maintained the judgmental view of the homeless characteristic
of the dominant culture, while softening that view with sympathy. Eisenhart,
"Promises and Puzzles of Culturally Sensitive Teaching," Practicing
Anthropology 17, no. 3 (Summer 1995): 24. Also see Rosemarie Rizzo-Tolk
and Hervé Varenne, "Joint Action on the Wild Side of Manhattan: The Power
of the Cultural Center on an Educational Alternative," Anthropology
and Education Quarterly 23, no. 3 (September 1992): 221-49. Many white
progressive educators would see such student learning as exemplifying anti-oppressive
growth — yet whiteness in such cases is actually doubly reified. On the
one hand, whiteness controls the terms of social meaning (here, the meanings
attached to homelessness) while, on the other hand, it privileges values
associated with whiteness — in particular, sympathy, which here extends
a benevolent concern to those suffering from oppression, but from a distant,
uninvolved, and even superior stance. Such sympathy confirms the naturalness
of white values and circumstances and blames the victims of prevailing
socio-economic relations. Those who demonstrate sympathy can congratulate
themselves on their well-intentioned attitudes towards the "unfortunate,"
whereas homeless people who practice survival skills in solidarity with
one another cannot claim a like morality.

65. Chalmers, "White Out," 70. Although most of
the objections were from white parents, Chalmers notes that a few parents
of color "who were invested in a . . . picture of benign diversity were
also opposed to the meeting" (73).

66. Chalmers, "White Out," 71.

67. Janet Helms describes "Autonomy," the highest
level of white identity development, as the stage in which the white person
"has an ideal view of what a nonracist White person is like" and consistently
engages in "activities and life experiences that will move the person toward
her or his ideal." Race Is a Nice Thing to Have, 87. Gary Howard
points out that "in the Helms model, autonomy does not represent an end-point
in the cycle of growth. It is . . . a state of being continually open to
new information and growth." Calling the final stage an open stage does
not change its status as the endpoint in development, however; it merely
incorporates the ideal of ongoing growth into the definition of the final
stage. It is like saying that, even at the highest stage of learning development,
a learner goes on learning. The point is not whether growth ends, but what
else,
besides
growth, characterizes the final stage of development as a white person.
Howard defines it thus: "In the autonomy stage we acquire a new and positive
connection to our Whiteness and a deep commitment to resist oppression."
We Can't Teach What We Don't Know, 94.

69. I owe this important question to Charise Nahm,
who has since undertaken a dissertation project in which she looks at white
teachers' sense of themselves as anti-racist not in terms of the categories
imposed by whiteness theorists but in terms of the teachers' own emergent
understandings of whiteness, racism, and anti-racism.

70. It is because what counts as anti-racist or
feminist shifts as we live out new possibilities that didactic political
fiction dates so quickly; the feminist and anti-racist certainties of an
earlier generation tend to look sadly inadequate to later generations.
In propagandist fiction, where the richness of narrative possibility is
constrained by a definite political formula, the inadequacy of principled
political and relational understanding can be especially apparent.

71. Anti-racist white students are sometimes shocked
to discover how few whites in the U.S. supported the Underground Railroad;
for well-meaning whites, it is hard to understand why human freedom was
not as obvious a democratic value a hundred and fifty years ago as it is
today. Yet even those of us who are thoughtful about racism may be unaware
of, let alone active in, what someday may come to be seen as the twentieth-
and twenty-first-century counterparts of the nineteenth-century struggle
for black freedom. Contemporary journalism and scholarship pay little sustained
attention to the modern slavery that produces so many of our consumer goods,
for example, or the environmental racism that protects a largely white,
middle-class, U.S. standard of living. Nor do most U.S. whites recognize
that, legally, many of our compatriots are relegated to second-class citizenship
— that Puerto Ricans, for instance, are American citizens who can be
drafted for service in the U.S. military but do not have the right to vote
in presidential elections or to elect representatives to Congress or the
Senate. From the perspective of the U.S. government, any proposed change
in the status of Puerto Ricans — such as the (competing) movements for
Puerto Rican nationhood and for statehood — is highly controversial,
even traitorous. As critics have pointed out, our national willingness
to maintain Puerto Ricans as second-class citizens is evidence that nineteenth-century
racism retains its hold over mainstream perceptions as to what is permissible,
possible, and desirable. "The Supreme Court cases that defined Puerto Rico's
relationship with the United States . . . are 'central documents in the
history of American racism,'" says Sanford Levinson, a University of Texas
law professor. If a majority of Puerto Ricans were to petition Congress
for statehood, "Levinson wonders what possible justification Congress could
give for . . . refusal. 'That most Puerto Ricans are non-white? That they
are Catholic? That they are poor? That they do not speak English?'" It
may be necessary to bring the political status of Puerto Ricans to crisis,
says University of Puerto Rico law professor Efrén Rivera Ramos, before
people begin to say, "Oh my God, this is what the Supreme Court
decided a hundred years ago! What have we been looking at that we missed
this?" Chris Mooney, "Status Anxiety in San Juan: Left-Wing Advocates of
Puerto Rican Statehood Come under Fire from All Sides," Lingua Franca
11, no. 3 (April 2001): 54-55.

73. Williams, Alchemy of Race and Rights,
28, 22. Williams identifies these and other familiar white refrains as
"truth-denying truisms" (28). The suppressed logic of such claims is played
out in Julianne Malveaux's exchange with a white man, in which she asked
"what it was that he wanted. 'My fair share,' the white man said. . . .
'I worked hard for it and now you are asking that I take less.' 'You have
more than 90 percent of the city contracts, and more than 80 percent of
the police and fire employees. You dominate far more than you should. What
else could you possibly want,' I asked in frustration. Without missing
a beat, the man responded, 'All of it.'" Sex Lies and Stereotypes: Perspectives
of a Mad Economist (Los Angeles: Pines One Publishing, 1994), 15.

95. For detailed comments on the manuscript, I wish
to thank Sofia Villenas, Octavio Villalpando, Ivan Van Laningham, Tracy
Stevens, Troy Richardson, Cris Mayo, Kathy Hytten, Dolores Delgado Bernal,
Ed Buendía, Deanna Blackwell, and the Education, Culture, and Society
discussion group at the University of Utah. This paper has been informed
by my department in more ways than I can count. I have the great pleasure
of being surrounded by faculty and graduate students who continually stimulate
me, lend me ideas and insights, and challenge my thinking. For some of
the particular ways in which I have been informed by conversations with
members of the department, I would especially like to thank Deanna Blackwell,
Bryan Brayboy, Kathy Spencer Christy, Mary DeLaRosa, Cleveland Hayes, Bobbie
Kirby, Brenda LeCheminant, Frank Margonis, Charise Nahm, and William Smith.